Change mount /media/username to /home using fstab didn't work

[qianian2]

Hi, I forgot to set my home partition to /home mount point during a clean reinstall so it automatically was mounted at /media/username.

Instead of starting over the reinstall, I defined the UUID in fstab, mounted, then changed /media/username to /home in fstab and mounted again. At first all the files disappeared from all the directories involved. After reboot, I have the default empty directories in /home and nothing under /media. Even the partial backup I made in a new folder (/media/home) disappeared.

I'd really appreciate an explanation of what might have happened. Please let me know any additional information I can post.

Thanks and be safe, everyone.

[TheFu]

Post the fstab file and the passwd entry for the users of the system.

Also, the file system for HOME must be capable of supporting Unix permissions, so NTFS or any of the FAT-whatever file systems cannot be used.

Any existing files that were _under_ the /home/ directory will be hidden of another partition is mounted over it.

[qianian2]

Thanks for the help. I'd appreciate step-by-step instructions for further action.

/etc/fstab follows. I added the last 2 lines. The home partition is ext4


# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=39d20bad-b9bd-45ed-a709-531b9e3a5b66 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=af6172b2-c4a3-443b-8a40-b21fb3cb6a97 none swap sw 0 0
# (identifier) (location, eg sda5) (format, eg ext3 or ext4) (some settings)
UUID=18eecef8-913b-4019-abce-3e06f69b10df /home ext4 defaults 0 2



/etc/passwd


speech-dispatcher:x:111:29:Speech Dispatcher,,,:/var/run/speech-dispatcher:/bin/falsewhoopsie:x:112:117::/nonexistent:/bin/false
kernoops:x:113:65534:Kernel Oops Tracking Daemon,,,:/:/usr/sbin/nologin
saned:x:114:119::/var/lib/saned:/usr/sbin/nologin
pulse:x:115:120:PulseAudio daemon,,,:/var/run/pulse:/usr/sbin/nologin
avahi:x:116:122:Avahi mDNS daemon,,,:/var/run/avahi-daemon:/usr/sbin/nologin
colord:x:117:123:colord colour management daemon,,,:/var/lib/colord:/usr/sbin/nologin
hplip:x:118:7:HPLIP system user,,,:/var/run/hplip:/bin/false
geoclue:x:119:124::/var/lib/geoclue:/usr/sbin/nologin
gnome-initial-setup:x:120:65534::/run/gnome-initial-setup/:/bin/false
gdm:x:121:125:Gnome Display Manager:/var/lib/gdm3:/bin/false
keizen:x:1000:1000:Keizen,,,:/home/keizen:/bin/bash

[TheFu]

Does /home/keizen exist?
is it owned by keizen?
Were the files in /home/ moved onto the new storage prior to the new storage being mounted over /home?

What does ls -al /home/ show? Please use code tags when posting that output.

[qianian2]

~$ ls -al /home/total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 keizen keizen 4096 Mar 30 17:48 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 Mar 30 13:11 ..
drwxrwxrwx 19 keizen keizen 4096 Mar 31 09:40 keizen


Where the files in /home/ moved onto the new storage PRior to the new storage being mounted over /home?


Do you mean where did I move the default files in /home after clean reinstall? I didn't touch them. They were empty directories, same as what I see under /home/keizen now.

Thanks again.

[qianian2]

Iirc initially the permissions for /home/keizen were drwx------ and I used chmod to try to view hidden files. Obviously no luck.

[TheFu]

Those permissions are bad. You want:

/home$ ls -alF
total 44
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Sep 22 2019 ./
drwxr-xr-x 33 root root 4096 Mar 21 09:12 ../
drwxr-xr-x 3 keizen keizen 4096 Sep 22 2019 keizen/
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Feb 28 2019 lost+found/

See the root:root and permissions?
See the lost+found/ directory? That gets created whenever a new file system gets created. Not seeing one in the output above means that /home/ didn't get mounted.

On my box, using LVM, /home is mounted as, df -Th

/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-home--lv ext4 74G 20G 51G 28% /home

Because i use LVM, on an SSD, the fstab looks like this:

/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-home--lv /home ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime 0 2

i used mkfs -t ext4 on the /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-home--lv to create the ext4 file system. if the file system didn't get manually created, then that disk is probably formatted NTFS. To check/verify, run

lsblk -e 7 -o name,size,type,fstype,mountpoint

As you can guess, i'm using a shotgun method of troubleshooting.

[qianian2]

Not seeing one in the output above means that /home/ didn't get mounted.

Is there a chance I can mount it after all?

/home$ df -Th

Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev devtmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs tmpfs 785M 1.7M 783M 1% /run
/dev/sda1 ext4 19G 6.5G 11G 38% /
tmpfs tmpfs 3.9G 115M 3.8G 3% /dev/shm
tmpfs tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop3 squashfs 92M 92M 0 100% /snap/core/8689
/dev/loop2 squashfs 1.0M 1.0M 0 100% /snap/gnome-logs/93
/dev/loop1 squashfs 3.8M 3.8M 0 100% /snap/gnome-system-monitor/135
/dev/loop0 squashfs 45M 45M 0 100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/1440
/dev/loop4 squashfs 3.8M 3.8M 0 100% /snap/gnome-system-monitor/127
/dev/loop5 squashfs 161M 161M 0 100% /snap/gnome-3-28-1804/116
/dev/loop7 squashfs 90M 90M 0 100% /snap/core/8268
/dev/loop6 squashfs 49M 49M 0 100% /snap/gtk-common-themes/1474
/dev/loop8 squashfs 15M 15M 0 100% /snap/gnome-characters/399
/dev/loop9 squashfs 1.0M 1.0M 0 100% /snap/gnome-logs/81
/dev/loop10 squashfs 55M 55M 0 100% /snap/core18/1668
/dev/loop11 squashfs 4.4M 4.4M 0 100% /snap/gnome-calculator/704
/dev/loop12 squashfs 55M 55M 0 100% /snap/core18/1705
/dev/loop13 squashfs 4.3M 4.3M 0 100% /snap/gnome-calculator/544
/dev/loop14 squashfs 15M 15M 0 100% /snap/gnome-characters/495
/dev/sda5 ext4 202G 1.2G 191G 1% /home
tmpfs tmpfs 785M 48K 785M 1% /run/user/1000



My bolded line worries me because I should have way more than 1.2 G used in that 220 GB home partition. It is, however, ext4, so I still don't understand why my fstab procedure didn't work.

$ lsblk -e 7 -o name,size,type,fstype,mountpoint

NAME SIZE TYPE FSTYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 232.9G disk
├─sda1 18.6G part ext4 /
├─sda2 1K part
├─sda5 205G part ext4 /home
└─sda6 9.3G part swap [SWAP]
sr0 1024M rom

Thanks.

[TheFu]

Iirc initially the permissions for /home/keizen were drwx------ and I used chmod to try to view hidden files. Obviously no luck.

There aren't any hidden files on Unix, just files/dirs that begin with a . aren't displayed for convenience. Seeing them is trivial.
ls -a

Looks like the missing lost+found/ is a 1-off. The partition is definitely being mounted to /home/.
What, exactly, is the issue? i seem to have lost track. Appears that sda5 is mounted on /home/ from here. i'm a little worried there isn't a lost+found directory in /home/lost+found.

Did you fix the permissions using the example provided?

[TheFu]

Do you mean where did I move the default files in /home after clean reinstall? I didn't touch them. They were empty directories, same as what I see under /home/keizen now.

They aren't empty. There are some .dotfiles and .dotdirs in there. Don't trust any GUi. They lie. Use ls -a to see what's in any directory.

To find missing files, use ls -alR and du -h * to see where stuff is. To see .dotfiles/.dotdirs, we need to use careful regex patterns. du -sh ~/.[a-Z]* will show most of them.

[qianian2]

If possible, I want to recover the contents of my home partition. It was mounted at /media/username by default and I used fstab to mount it at /home. If recovery is impossible, I want to know what I did to lose them. Thanks for any help.

du -sh ~/.[a-Z]*

4.0K /home/keizen/.bash_history427M /home/keizen/.cache
564M /home/keizen/.config
4.0K /home/keizen/.gconf
16K /home/keizen/.gnupg
4.0K /home/keizen/.ICEauthority
1.6M /home/keizen/.local
21M /home/keizen/.mozilla
76K /home/keizen/.pki
4.0K /home/keizen/.ssh
0 /home/keizen/.sudo_as_admin_successful
2.4M /home/keizen/.zoom




I used chmod again to get the following permissions, but there is still no lost + found.


/home$ ls -alFtotal 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 keizen keizen 4096 Mar 30 17:48 ./
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 Mar 30 13:11 ../
drwxr-xr-x 19 keizen keizen 4096 Mar 31 09:40 keizen/

[TheFu]

If possible, I want to recover the contents of my home partition. It was mounted at /media/username by default and I used fstab to mount it at /home. If recovery is impossible, I want to know what I did to lose them. Thanks for any help.

Ah .... appears the error was that the HOME directory was mounted too high.

Needed ....
/media/thefu ----> /home/thefu
but it appears this was done:
/media/thefu ----> /home
OR
mkdir /media/home ; mv /media/thefu /media/home/thefu
then mount it.

I’m just guessing there. Does that seem like what happened? No idea what may have happened to the old files. They should have been in /home/ somewhere. Nothing automatic would delete them to my knowledge.

[qianian2]

That's exactly what happened, thank you for explaining. So confusing -- I see /home/keizen but as we saw this is all that's in /home. Any possibility re-mounting it could give access to those contents?


keizen@Stonau:~$ ls -al ..total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 keizen keizen 4096 Mar 30 17:48 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 Mar 30 13:11 ..
drwxr-xr-x 19 keizen keizen 4096 Apr 1 08:32 keizen

[TheFu]

Can't hurt to try.

[qianian2]

The output of TestDisk (sorry I only have an image link (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1DJaxXCZpoO_3eQ-dj7YdKvI-AUviHnID)) identifies two partitions that can't be recovered. They are identical in size (429786944) but the Start and End are off by 8 each. Does that mean there are two indices and can I recover my files?

Additionally TestDisk says The harddisk seems too small! Check the harddisk size: HD jumper settings, BIOS detection...

Is it possible mounting to /home without deleting the directories there by default caused my desired content to be hidden under the default ones? Any help is appreciated. Also should I clean up this post and re-post?

[TheFu]

i don't use testdisk. i have "backups" instead, which seem to cause many fewer problems and less prayer is needed.
For dealing with file systems, sometimes it is easiest to boot from a "Try Ubuntu" flash installer and choose "Try Ubuntu" to look at the storage when it isn't actively being used by the running OS.